Anselm Hollo – The Tortoise of History

“In this posthumous collection, avant-garde poet Anselm Hollo displays his spare, sly lyrical greatness. The poems are fragmentary, with echoes of William Carlos Williams, finding pathways between the ancient Greece and Wild Bill Hickock – both the American and the European alive in him at all times. This is Hollo at his witty, inventive best.”

“In this posthumous trove of brief, zestful poems, Hollo (1934-2013), a prolific poet and multilingual translator, relates the “incredible ONSLAUGHT of being” , seemingly dashing off each of these frentic, fragmented vignettes in a fit of wild gusto. He’s capable of filtering even the most mundane phenomena through his playful mind – One poem features a woman in an antique store chiding her dog, and another consists of a single line, identical to its title – “b u g s k i l l e d o u r t r e e ” . Yet within Hollo’s exuberance is an awareness of mortality – “Dear hearts it is late in the game/ and how will the untold be told?”. The last section of the collection consists of what Hollo describes as “an intuitive display” of the work ofthe ancient Greek poet Hipponax, crude, delightful renderings of the disjointed originals. He interprets one snippet as “her nose a bell/with snot as a clapper”, and an ageless nugget of wisdom is rendered as “unfunny he who drinks his lunch”. Hollo’s quirky and disarming joy remained intact until the end – “I print your messages/ dear friends/and feel the love and/accept it with/all my heart and brain which/ still feel like they’re working”.

[Hipponax of Ephesus]

[Wild Bill Hickock]

[Anselm Hollo]

Here’s the title poem:

The Tortoise of History

The tortoise of history
keeps stomping along

it carries
on its back

all the prophets,
visionaries
“great men”

It is almost blind

but its legs still work.

Here’s a typically witty two-liner (ok, it’s a three-liner):

Why Not

put the book mark
at the wrong page

Here’s that bitter-sweet “awareness of mortality”:

Don’t Tell Me

Don’t tell me you can’t
love the dead
sometimes I love the dead more
than the still living

there was a time
one sounded as
“authoritative”
as any so-called media